AirMagnet Distributes An Upgrade

AirMagnet of Sunnyvale, Calif., has announced an upgrade to its Distributed WLAN system. The company built its reputation with handheld/PocketPC and laptop-based wireless LAN monitor systems. The Distributed model -- using probes placed along the WLAN to monitor the access points (APs) using airwaves, usually one probe for every six APs -- was launched in April of last year.

The new Distributed version 4.0 -- the number is jumping ahead to keep pace with the handheld/laptop versions that will be coming soon -- will include many new features including a new "network dashboard" interface used for tracking the goings-on in the network.

The updated sensors can now not only monitor the airwaves but also secure them. A rogue AP management capability has been introduced and, based policies defined by the administrator, the probe can temporarily "shut down" any rogue found in radio distance of a sensor. This is done by sending a constant stream of over-the-air de-associate requests. This puts the rogue into a disabled state until network administrators can physically track it down. AirMagnet says this feature should be used with care, so as not to take down neighboring APs, which you can specify in the dashboard. The rogue detection includes looking for and notifying admins about software based APs ("soft APs").

There are also new alarms available in the product, such as looking at off-hour WLAN traffic for abnormal patterns, hotspots that allow traffic to user machines, vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi Protected Access's pre-shared keys, finding unencrypted 802.1X broadcasts or multicasts, and more. Security policies in the product are now tiered, to be global or for individual APs or SSIDs .

The price of AirMagnet Distributed starts at $7,995 which includes four sensors, their management console and server software.